"Good morning, Elder uncle," she said politely.
"The foreigner talks! The foreigner talks!" The children punched each other and giggled. The old man’s eyes were almost lost in folds of skin; his papery mouth trembled.
Then she studied the soldiers, wood faced, sitting in two rows in their flatbed truck. Each gripped the worn stock of an automatic rifle.
"What are soldiers doing out here?" Spencer whispered.
She swallowed. "Remember what they’ve been saying. This is a military area."
"So’s Nevada," he said sourly.
He was right, of course. She noticed the other passengers had edged away from the soldiers and turned their backs to them. An unpleasant silence ballooned over the group, broken only by the slight slapping of the waves and the hum of the barge’s little motor as it bellied up to the shore and loaded everyone on.
They crossed the river in silence and drove off the barge on the other side. "The PLA’s not too popular out here, is it?" Spencer asked. She translated softly. Kong and Lin looked at each other but didn’t answer.
The road was now dirt, rutted and unpaved, and they drove west on it through landscape which had subtly changed. Instead of rocky, pebbly desert there stretched away all around them a carpet of yellow earth-loess, Spencer called it, the dust and silt carried and spread by the Yellow River over geologic time. This blanket of loess was not flat, but billowed and rolled in every direction, making hills and hollows and soft eroded canyons, all the same dun color. Loess. Left by the river. Carved out of this earth, every so often, were little settlements of houses, with sunflowers and hollyhocks blooming by their doors. But as they drove through these settlements the people Alice glimpsed didn’t look as she expected. They had neither the flat, scornful faces of the Mongols nor the mixed, half-Turkic faces of the Muslims. They weren’t tall the way northern Chinese were either. The people she saw were small, with wiry, curved legs and compact, corded bodies. They looked like the people in China’s southern provinces. Puzzling.
"Have these villages been here long?" Alice asked Dr. Kong as they rattled through one.
"Not long," he answered.
"Like… a few generations?" she pushed.
He shifted in his seat, adjusting his cell phone on his belt, looking away. "The people you see out here were resettled. East China and South China are very crowded. Here, the population is small. So people moved here."
She heard the careful diction of Chinese evasion and glanced imprudently at Lin. He darkened his eyes in the universal signaclass="underline" Don’t ask about this. She turned, mind racing, and fixed an innocent look out the window. So! These villagers must have been inmates of the laogai, released from the camps but not allowed to leave the area. Of course. She could see they were poor people with hardscrabble lives, hanging washing over rocks and pulling carts down dirt tracks. They had all been prisoners, and now were doomed to a lifetime in this yellow dust. Was Lin’s wife one?
It was almost noon when they finally topped a rise and headed down a long slope to the Shuidonggou site. At the bottom of the little dirt valley lay a winding, glittering creek lined with rustling acacia trees. Behind the creek rose a canyon wall, and along the top of the canyon limped what was left of the Great Wall.
In the center of the canyon face, halfway up, a huge box-like hole had been excavated.
"This is it," Kong whispered. He jumped out of the jeep and scrambled eagerly up the yellow-earth wall.
They all followed. "This is one of the few archaeological sites in China that’s really been excavated," Adam told Alice. "Like Zhoukoudian."
Lin pried a tiny piece of stone out of the dirt wall. "See? This type of rock is native to this area. It could have occurred here naturally. But this one"-he worked another one loose- "had to have been brought here by someone. That’s how we can tell humans lived here. And look." He brushed off the bits of dirt. "See these scrape marks and chips? It was worked by someone’s hands."
"Incredible," Alice breathed. "What kind of culture lived here?"
"This is a Late Paleolithic site," Dr. Lin said. "So, of course, I do not know as much as Dr. Kong." He glanced at the other Chinese professor, on his knees, excitedly picking bits of rock from the dirt wall. "But I know a little. We should find microliths everywhere. You see, stonework was quite advanced here, and they trimmed pieces like this into scrapers and blades. Hunting was crucial-until about eight thousand years ago, when they started domesticating steppe animals and growing crops. Then their tool making changed." He smiled down at her. "Do you find it interesting?"
"Interesting!" She examined the stone he had handed her. "It’s almost beyond words. How old do you think this is?"
He peered at it. "Maybe ten, twelve thousand years."
"I’ve never held anything so old," she breathed.
"Look!" Spencer cried suddenly.
He had picked up a tiny circle of something white, and laid it on his palm; it had a perfect hole drilled through its middle. A bead. "See?" Spencer said. "Only a human with a tool could have made this. It’s ostrich shell. That makes it easy to date-ostriches have been extinct here since the end of the Pleistocene. Beautiful, isn’t it?"
Alice translated, skipping over the words ostrich and Pleistocene,and saying instead, "a big bird that has been extinct here for a long time." She stared awestruck at the tiny thing. Someone made that at least ten thousand years ago, she thought. Ten thousand years – the time unit of commitment in the Chinese mind. I will love you for ten thousand years. May you live for ten thousand years. Wansui.
"What?" said Dr. Kong, looking up from the spot where he was working.
Spencer held out the bead.
"Let me see," said Kong, reaching for it, and somehow in the fumble the thing dropped to their feet, glanced off someone’s shoe, and bounced out of the cutaway toward the valley floor below.
Alice saw Lin’s face, stricken, follow the tiny, threading arc the bead made for a split second against the air. White, almost the same color as the earth below, it would be hell to find.
"Oh, shit," Adam mumbled. "Sorry."
"The fault is mine." Kong sighed.
"No, really. God."
"It doesn’t matter," Kong said. He turned to the wall and returned to prizing out chips and rock bits. "There is more here to find."
"No"-Lin shook his head-"it was perfect. I’m going to look for it." He turned and climbed back down the handholds in the wall.
Adam sighed. "I feel terrible."
"It’s okay," she said, knowing it wasn’t, not really.
"Listen, Alice. Let’s start looking for the Mongol family. They’re the thing we should concentrate on."
She closed her eyes and visualized the empty rock-and-earth expanse of this little valley the way they had seen it, driving in. There had been no signs of habitation. None. "Did you see anything from the jeep?"
"No, I didn’t. But let’s just start walking."
She explained to Dr. Kong, and they followed Lin back down the wall. Kong was absorbed in the microliths embedded in the loess walls, Lin in pacing back and forth by the stream, head down, scanning the soft earth. Alice and Adam left them and hiked upstream.
"Teilhard never says exactly where they lived."
"What if they’re gone?" she asked.
"They might be."
"What if even their house is gone?"
"That’s unlikely. The climate here preserves things, which is why Teilhard found so much at Shuidonggou in the first place. We’ll find them. We just have to cover the whole area."
So they walked, in the pulsating yellow sun, through the silty dirt. The crumbling canyon walls rose around them. Ravines and washes tumbled down from the crest above, where the ridgeline was still topped with the eroded backbone of the Great Wall.